Lost Properties

arthur+martha artist Lois Blackburn and writer Philip Davenport will launch our new participatory event LOST PROPERTIES. You will find them at: Manchester Art Market, at St Ann's Square, Manchester City Centre, http://www.manchestermarkets.com Friday 25th and Saturday 26th June, 10am to 5.30pm. They will be exhibiting existing LOST PROPERTIES artworks and making new ones with the visiting public. Everyone is welcome. They will document works made during the event and photographs will be posted onto their portfolio site http://www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-and-martha/

LOST PROPERTIES is a project about caring. You might be a carer, need care yourself, know someone else who does, or help pay for care through your taxes. Care and support affects everybody. We are looking for ways to describe the people you care for most and the people who care for you. Lost Properties is an experiment in making art without using drawing or pictures, only words and secondhand objects. Who do you care about, and what reminds you of them?


This event has been kindly sponsored by Oxfam and Manchester Markets.

if p then q readings & book launches

@ Odder Bar
14 Oxford Road (opposite The BBC), Manchester, UK
23rd June 2010
6.30 pm [1:30 pm Eastern Time in the US]
Free admission

Performers:
Joy as Tiresome Vandalism
Geof Huth
Tom Jenks
Lucy Harvest Clarke

Programme:

6.30: Joy as Tiresome Vandalism present Nøjagtig Pamplemousse
7.00: Geof Huth (live stream – watch at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/geof-huth)
7.45: Lucy Harvest Clarke (watch live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tom-jenks-lucy-harvest-clarke)
8.15: Tom Jenks: (watch live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tom-jenks-lucy-harvest-clarke)

If you can’t be there in person use the above URLs to watch on the internet. Please be aware that all times are approximate.

Next Week...

Next week is busy up north:
Mill24 is a two-part series of 24-hour exhibitions ready to set up stage for the second time this May 2010 at Islington Mill, Salford. Moving forward from the intense energy of April’s show, Part 2 this weekend will present a multitude of artists, ideas and practices; but offering a difference in pace with the new start time of 12 midday. The overarching focus of this month’s show is to highlight the normally unseen processes of idea generating and work making that normally occur prior to an exhibition. For those who dare to endure our 24-hour challenge, there will be live broadcasting, endurance open-studio projects and performance reenactments in abundance.
Mill24 will once again utilise all 5 floors of the mill’s space in its diverse 24-hour showcase of innovatively presented art: from a one-hour lecture series featuring talks and performances, to interactive sound art, to live painting, animation and more. http://mill24.blogspot.com/

The Other Room
Wednesday 2nd June, 7.00 pm.
The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY.
Admission is free.
Readers: Susana Gardner, Peter Manson and Nicole Mauro.



Counting Backwards is a new series of text-sound-performance events. It takes place on the first Thursday of alternate months at Fuel cafe bar in Withington. The first event is on Thursday 3 June 2010. Entrance is free. Performing at the first event are Mike Cannell, THF Drenching and Holly Pester.

worksetting
a place for everything and everything in its place
04.06 - 31.07.2010
A new gallery in Huddersfield curated by my friend Paul Bradley opens with a cracking first exhibition to integrate the new gallery into it’s environment with art and design works that involve materials and concepts not normally associated with either medium, but relate to some of the other retail and creative activities that already exist in the Arcade. I think that this is going to become an important space to keep an eye on.
http://worksetting.co.uk/index2.shtml

And sadly, probably the last event of the Salford Concert Series/University arts programme for some time, …menu for murmur, at The Chapman Gallery, The University of Salford, Peel Park Campus, Salford, M5 4WT
Tuesday 1 June – Friday 25 June
Performance: Saturday 5 June, 5.00 – 7.00pm

The show features many of the programme’s previous exhibitors, (including me), Claus van Bebber, Berserker, Chop Shop, Seth Cluett, Matt Dalby, G. Fisher, Rob Gawthrop, Chris Gladwin, Adolfo Guevara, Ryu Hankil, Paul Haywood, Espen Jensen, Petri Kuljuntausta, Bob Levene, Urban Mäder, Jonathan Maj, Lee Patterson, Stan Pete, Kirsten Reese, Henning Schweichel, Hans Specht, Frans de Waard, Matt Wand, Hainer Wörmann, and Jason Zeh.
Curators Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke have invited international sound artists to contribute individual pieces that will stand on their own but will also create a new collaborative piece …menu for murmur. The sound objects, which include electronic devices, rulers and even a desk fan, will consciously be arranged in one space far and near.

A performance event will be held on Saturday 5 June featuring sounding interventions and interaction with the exhibition by sound artists Mick Beck and Matt Wand.
Opening Times: Monday – Friday, 10.00am – 4.00pm
Admission: Free

Sadly I will miss most of these events because I am in Dortmund speaking at the City of Culture conference on culture and social inclusion
http://www.fonds-soziokultur.de/shortcut/en/

Dinner for the Finns

Arrived from Tampere (Finland) today, Laura Köönikkä, Chief Curator in the Tampere Art museum, Elina Bonelius, Moominvalley museum curator, and Taina Myllyharju, Tampere museum director (pictured with Barney). Sue created one of her legendary dinner parties for the guests:

Menu
Du Barry soup
Warm duck and orange salad
Pan-fried cod loin with a bean, potato and choizo broth
Assiette of chocolate coffee desserts

They'll spend tomorrow in Bury, looking at the Gallery-Museum and preparing future projects.

A Big Night in Manchester

Thursday night (15 April) in Manchester feels like a real art festival (unlike the Manchester International Festival) but one that appears to be a happy accident. Castlefield Art Gallery, the Chinese Arts Centre, Cornerhouse and Rogue Project Space are all previewing their latest exhibitions, all within walking distance of each other.

Castlefield Gallery
David Osbaldeston:
Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play)

I’m looking forward to seeing this show by my newly discovered neighbour, David Osbaldeston. Through manipulated images of news photography and a print series of interpretive book cover designs from Luigi Pirandello’s celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the exhibition will explore relationships between the gallery and theatre staging, displacement, reality, illusion and social discord.

The journalistic images are taken from photographic records made between the 1970’s and 1990’s of protests or accidents that report a breakdown of social and economic order such as the LA Riots, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Waco Siege, the Piper Alpha disaster and the Iraqi Highway of Death. Re-photographed, appropriated and re-presented by Osbaldeston with textual snippets, amplified in scale and printed on 1980s Ilford photographic paper; the works draw playful attention to the constructed nature of the photographic image.

Exhibition Continues: Friday 16 April – Sunday 6 June 2010

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Default.asp?eKey=333&eP=1
Address: 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB

Cornerhouse
Contemporary Art Iraq

The first comprehensive UK exhibition of new and recent contemporary art from Iraq since the first Gulf War, examining practices that are emerging with fresh perspectives from a culture marked by conflict and turmoil. This has a bad taste because of the evil racism of UK immigration policy with 5 artists refused entry to the country because they don’t have bank accounts in Iraq. See
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/iraqi-artists-denied-entry-to-britain-for-their-own-exhibition-1934726.html I wonder whether the shameful Foreign Secretary and the Iraqi Ambassador will turn up to the preview, and if they are booked to make opening remarks.

Exhibition continues: Fri 16 April to Sun 20 June

http://www.cornerhouse.org/contemporaryartiraq
70 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5NH, UK

Chinese Arts Centre
Lan Wei / Decaying End
anothermountainman (Stanley Wong)

Exhibition continues: 16th April – 12th June 2010

Lan Wei / Decaying End is anothermountainman’s first solo photography exhibition in the UK. It features a number of haunting large-scale photographic prints of abandoned, incomplete building projects from across Asia. Following the opening of its doors to foreign investment in China in the 1980s there was frenzied investment in real estate, which was exposed to corruption and contributed to the eventual collapse of the property market in the late 1990s. When the bubble burst huge numbers of building projects were abandoned and left unfinished. This wave of abortive building construction spread across other Asian cities that also experienced the same pattern of meteoric economic growth and collapse. The photographs in the exhibition were taken in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Turkey and Singapore.

I’m also looking forward to meeting Wang Jun (picture), the current artist in residence and who is opening his studio also on this full evening. Since his recent residency in China, Phil Davenport has told me a lot of good things about Wang, whom he worked with out there.

http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/
Market Buildings, Thomas Street, Manchester, M4 1EU

Rogue Artists' Studios & Project Space
Tom Hobson, In the blessed abyss of the eternal ether

Exhibition continues: 15th – 24th of April 2010 (By appointment only)

With a monumental effort comparable to the great men of history and the inventiveness of a mad professor, Hobson has created a device for talking to the sky and turned mountains upside down for this (his first solo) exhibition.

http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/
Address: 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH

Discussing art collecting

Yesterday at the Buy Art Fair at Urbis http://www.buyartfair.co.uk/ I took part in the panel discussion of "Public/Private: Institutions and Developing a Market for Contemporary Art."

The others on the panel were Lewis Biggs (Liverpool Biennial), Mark Waugh (A Foundation), and Paul Moss (Workplace Gallery).

I quite enjoyed the discussion but think it was only just getting started when we ran out of time. My main position was that most UK public authority galleries have been driven by governmental non-cullture priorities for so long that curators have been artistically de-skilled and don't have curatorial confidence to be validating players in the art market; in this context, the Arts Council's ambition for more adventurous collecting policies is mostly a fantasy.

Zombie Parade

An unexpected and very large procession of Zombies has just walked passed the flat. It was at least as entertaining as Deller's considerably more expensive International Festival Procession. A quick search reveals that this happens all over the world -

http://www.zombie-aid.com/Zombie_Aid_website_by_Carl/Videos.html

Studio visit

The Bury Gallery show following "Agency of Words" (Text Festival) has a working title of "Not At This Address". The initial impetus for this was the observation that there are some very interesting artists working in Manchester (but with clearly international locus and impacts), who have not been properly presented in the city, because of the Manchester's curatorial weaknesses, previously touched on here. It is of course a similar situation with the poetry scene - internationally significant poets disconnected from the local structures. (A case in point, the other day, I bumped into Michael Schmidt, http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=665 who seemed much more interested in his just-bought bags of summer berries and fuzzing over Barney than he was that Ron Silliman had been in town. And he didn't mention the Text Festival at all!).

So in preparation for the next exhibition, I visited 3 artists at Rogue Studios last week, http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/opportunities.asp : Pat Flynn (picture), Andrew McDonald and Magnus Quaife - all of whom will be in show. I don't know whether they would agree but while each artist had a very distinctive voice, I sensed a single commonality in their individual questioning of the divergent boundary between reality and conceptual space. Coincidentally Pat and Andrew are both routed in sculpture but have gravitated toward digital practice: Pat Flynn (re)creates objects and environments in software generating images and sculptures eerily mathematically real but reflecting the uncanny valley of between consciousness and object. Andrew McDonald also resolves sculptural dimensionality by turning to the digital. Andrew's scratchily drawn remarkable Beckett landscapes and unspecified warehouse interiors around which a headless man called John endlessly circulates are at once both tragic and affirming. http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=15794 He also creates shocking lightening room-illuminated cinematic tableau.

In similar questioning of perception, expectation and reality, Magnus Quaife takes images and interrogates them directly on that ground. Primarily working in watercolour, Magnus has a series of rural idylls, some rough re-paintings historic landscapes, featuring the box cabinet of one of the first super-computers used to simulate the real world; or seeing images of May 1968, and finding instead images of quirky images of life of the period, which converted into faded graphics accumulatively create an unreal era of non-memory.

Other artists so far confirmed for the show are: Sarah Sanders, Brass Art, Jesse Ash, Maurice Carlin, Amy Pennington, Rachel Goodyear, Rachel Well, and Alison Erika Forde. There will also be a sound art event during the show. It was interesting talking to the 3 artists that none of them had visited Bury Art Gallery since its innovative programme began (and that's probably nearly a decade now!); just as they don't situate their practice in the local and therefore why should they, Bury positions itself in the international context; However, my thinking is that the curatorial practice assumes that important artistic debates are moved forward more significantly through the dialogue between artforms as well as within them - hence events like the Text Festival.

(Tomorrow: down to London for the Comtemporary Art Society reception at 11 Downing St.)

Journeys from the Holocaust

An art project in Manchester will commemorate the holocaust in poems displayed at Piccadilly Railway Station, Manchester. On Holocaust Memorial Day (27th January 2009) poetic texts created by older people, many of whom are holocaust survivors, will be displayed on the giant electronic billboard at Piccadilly Station, Manchester. The holocaust has often been linked to trains: millions of people, particularly Jews, were taken to concentration camps by train before being killed in the notorious nazi Final Solution during the Second World War. This artwork will give fragments from accounts of their journeys: to destruction and journeys of escape.

http://www.arthur-and-martha.co.uk/pages/kindness%20samples.htm Artist Lois Blackburn and poet Philip Davenport from the arthur+martha arts organisation have been working with older Jewish people at The Morris Feinmann Home, Manchester, exploring memories of and meditations on the holocaust. John Collins from Imperial War Museum North has worked with the team, bringing objects and personal stories from the museum collection to discuss.“This work is made up of family histories, refugee backgrounds and direct holocaust memories,” says Davenport. “We are interested in the bric-a-brac of people’s lives, the tiny moments, rather than grand history. Sometimes these little things can illuminate a far bigger picture.”

Maria Turner, Activities Co-ordinator at the Morris Feinmann Home, described the effect of arthur+martha’s work: “In a very sensitive and caring approach, the project has enabled our residents to talk about their experiences and express their feelings.”

The Other Room video

http://theotherroom.wordpress.com/december-2008-videos/

Islington Mill Art Academy

Back in 1982, I was nearly thrown out of Loughborough College of Art for too persistently challenging the competence of my lecturers. And in 2003 after a brief waste of time at Manchester Metropolitan University's MA, I resigned in disgust at the disorganisation and mediocrity of the poetry lecturers. So I am comfortably in the camp critical of the state of arts education. Higher education has become a business that is less to do with transfer of knowledge or nurturing artists and more to do with administrations that generate fees and 'hit' targets disingenuously pretending that progress is constant. So it was a great pleasure last week to spend some time in conversation with the artists of the Islington Mill Art Academy.

http://www.islingtonmill.com/d.php?r=artacademy

http://www.islingtonmillartacademy.blogspot.com/


The Academy is a fascinating attempt by a group of young artists to education themselves, to develop their practice autonomously. Choosing their own influences, the artists invite practitioners to talk about their work, respond to the work going on and establish a creative dialogue.

Read

Well who would have thought it? It turned out that I could work out how to read the poems after all. It felt like the audience got what I was doing too. Most of it turned on speed and breath I think. I found that I edited really visually or semantically dense passages on the hoof hoping to at least get the flavour of the original. One of the audience said in response to this, that this was surely an argument for editing them out of the originals as extraneous. But I can't accept that; that way lays writing for performance rather than writing to write. The performance was just a snapshot of what the poems might be/were on that particular night. I suppose the contrary revelation for me was that I actually really enjoyed the experience and want to do it again.

The only thing I didnt do was read Calculus - because I forgot - minus the proper layout - because working that out on this page is as difficult as reading it. So here it is:

0. monotonic the fall. In the cot, of equilibria and reducing complexities, the baby recognised my death as our eyes another reason to avoid the butchery of children’s moment Cut, a form of transitivity when the engine stops and you can't go on, but you get out of the car and go on. A prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage one experiential state of the body to another implying augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act She reminded me of what we could have had - and it was remarkably paradisiacal, only less so. The dynamics hovering bird wings, the public are mad those that aren't found in any species in city park ascriptions of method. Two opposing points connected by positive and negative charge tired but it was there, something about never getting there – the slender margin language object – daily routine of back and forth sine wave study to the quaint notions of windswept steppe and desert’s unequal presumption of innocence without fear of retributive access will be the end of memory: 1

The Other Room

The Other Room on 3rd December I'll be reading with Carol Watts and Scott Thurston.

See http://theotherroom.wordpress.com/

This may be a surprise if anyone notices, because I virtually never read - as a matter of artistic 'policy'. Putting aside issues of reading as marketing, my writing contains its own investigative imperative that is driven by the need to solve problems of language and space; generally if a problem is solved by the writing itself, I don't see any need to read it to anyone - if someone wants to know whether my solution was viable or useable they read it themselves. In addition, formally my texts tend to use visual resonances, rhythms of layout or word shape, counterpoints of line beginnings and endings which I can't see how you could punctuate vocally without introduction sound accents that are not equivalent. On top of that personally I am dyslexic reading aloud.

I'm buggered if I can think of a good reason why I am reading but I am.

So here is the problem I have: I am going to read poems that should not be read and which I am not able to read!

Therefore, (obviously) I will start with the toughest one to read: Mirror Canon Snips. This was written as an installation on the staircase at the Melbourne DrawingSpace. Originally, as part of the show preview, I envisaged as well as the installation there would be a performative element; two readers one at the top and one at the bottom of the stairs would ascend/descend reading the text, finishing when they had swapped places. As this was in my mind from the start, I found myself asking - is it possible to write something that is so difficult to read that it causes someone walking on stairs to trip and fall over? Starting from a position of not being able to read the poems for all the reasons about, my Other Room reading begin with a poem that aims to make the reader to fall over.

Second, I will read from Reykjavik, (written for the Safn Museum) which if you havent seen it is a single line long line poem in a concertina form - meaning that there are multiple readings/directions in which it can be read. So who knows which one I will find?

After this I will go to some poems from 50 Heads - although it has been read in public, it hasn't been read by me. First I will read Calculus - because there is a huge dyslexic episode on the page at the beginning of it. Then I will go to Entscheidungsproblem - appropriate because it asks the question: "is there some procedure which could solve all problems one after another?" (that is actually the first line) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem . Of course by this point both me and the audience will be losing hope that a solution is possible and so Lassitude will be the next poem. And as I know in advance that I cannot achieve my goal, the final poem will be Underachievement.

The reading can't succeed because it is impossible - therefore it will be a success.

Peace Demo

WE have the annual irritation of New Labour's party conference this week - Manchester streets are sealed off, police patrol in vast numbers, helicoptors hover overhead night and day. On the first day on which the sun seems to have shone all year, it was great to see the End the Wars Demonstration roll into town.